BIG SHOT OF THE WEEK: Has Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook morphed into a monster beyond his control?

His Facebook page shows he lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife and two daughters. He listens to punk rockers Green Day, watches Game of Thrones, and lists among his favourite films pre-Millennial blockbusters such as The Matrix and Gladiator.

‘Check-ins’ reveal a recent visit to the University of Kansas, he has a photo album of a barbecue he once hosted called ‘The Great Goat Roast of 2009’, and this week he’s posted a portrait of his family sharing their first Seder, the traditional Jewish Passover meal.

At first glance, this could be the profile of any white, suburban, middle class American male aged the wrong side of 30.

Except this account is far from ordinary. It belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, the social media firm he began in a Harvard dormitory in 2003, which has grown into the world’s eighth largest company with some 2billion users.

It reveals our likes, our dislikes, who our friends are and where we have visited. It is where we announce important news, josh with colleagues and interact with strangers about which restaurant to visit. It is where we have shared our most personal moments.

In A far-off future, when snarling morlocks scavenge the earth, it will not be the crumbling libraries from which they will learn about the peoples of the 21st century. It will be from the databases of Zuckerberg’s sprawling creation.

Thanks to Facebook’s global impact, its architect will doubtless come to be mentioned in the same breath as the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords before him, but any heroic status is now firmly moot.

The firm’s flippant attitude to our data over the years, culminating in the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, has led many to ask: Has Zuckerberg’s ‘baby’, as he describes it, morphed into a monster beyond his control?

Its inception has already passed into folklore. Zuckerberg, a child computer prodigy from upstate New York and son of a dentist (known locally as ‘Painless Dr Z’) studies psychology at Harvard and creates puerile platform Facemash, where users rate the attractiveness of female students.

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It prompts the idea for Facebook, which allows friends to interact. He possibly screws over a couple of backers, some upper-class twins named Winklevoss whom he ends up having to pay over £200m.

Within a year of its launch, it has 1m users. He drops out, moves to Silicon Valley where he rejects billion-dollar offers, marries long-term love Priscilla Chan and ends up with a £70bn-plus fortune.

But what do we know about the world’s most enigmatic businessman? He wears a uniform of grey t-shirt and blue jeans from which he never deviates, possibly as a result of being colour blind.

Those who’ve met him say ‘Zuck’ can be engaging and passionate, thoughtful even, certainly more charming than the character from the brilliant 2010 movie The Social Network, in which he’s cruelly portrayed as a sardonic loner devoid of friends.

Legacy: Thanks to Facebook’s global impact, its architect will doubtless come to be mentioned in the same breath as the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords before him

That said, were he a computer programme you’d take issue with the person who wrote his code.

He talks too fast, can be condescending and glares in ways which can be confrontational and unnerving. He has an irritating habit of not finishing his sentences.

We’ve been drip-fed titbits about his general down-to-earthness. He drives a Honda; lives in rented accommodation (no longer true – home is a £30m compound); doesn’t own a telly; barely spends money, which he’s pledging to give away anyway. Yadda yadda.

Otherwise, he never gives interviews, least of all press conferences. His inner circle can’t, or at least won’t, speak. When scandal erupts, he has a cowardly habit of going to ground before releasing a statement via his Facebook page.

This is hardly the behaviour of a responsible chief executive, least of all one of the world’s most powerful. Perhaps we shall learn more next week when he appears in front of Congress to answer questions about Cambridge Analytica.

Because for now, it’s hard not to discern that Mark Zuckerberg cares rather more about his own privacy than he does about ours.

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